


Rupture

by Baelkaz



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arcane Explosions and Such, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-02-10 11:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18659419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baelkaz/pseuds/Baelkaz
Summary: From the 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide: "Placing a bag of holding inside an extradimensional space created by a Handy Haversack, Portable Hole, or similar item instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane. The gate originates where the one item was placed inside the other. Any creature within 10 feet of the gate is sucked through it to a random location on the Astral Plane. The gate then closes. The gate is one-way only and can't be reopened."Takes place at the end of episode 55, where a different decision is made.





	1. Chapter 1

It’s 4:42 in the morning when Beau rips the heart out of the giant twisted minotaur thing. He knows it with exact certainty, despite the last few minutes being an absolute hell. He’s been fading in and out of consciousness, Caduceus’s normally calm speech, now loud and frantic shouting across the cavern, the magic closing his wounds just as fast as new ones come. A sickly sweet potion down his throat and Nott’s wide yellow eyes staring into his. Jester’s hand on his chest glowing with power, her eyes desperate. Powerful blue arms dragging him to safety and then forcing his own eyes open - ripping himself back into the waking world.

It’s 4:49 now, and the fiend’s body is steaming in the underground pond. Caduceus is awake again, Nott isn’t making eye contact with anyone, and Jester’s smile lasted just as long as it took to conduct her ritual.

Beau had made some wisecrack about Caleb having a strong grip when he needed to, but the others winced instead of laughed. He had stood up to Fjord’s power, but he hadn’t held on very well when it counted. He hadn’t trusted his friends, hadn’t stood up to the succubus, hadn’t believed that they would stand by him.

“You see that?” Fjord’s voice cuts through his ruminating as it echoes across the cavern. He had been calling over his shoulder to Caduceus as both of them swept the cave for more danger.

“Hmm. Yeah. That’s weird.” Caduceus answers, turning away from the algae he had been inspecting. Both of them appear to be staring at a tight group of stalagmites in a far corner of the cave, where a small orange glint shone in the reflection of his Dancing Lights.

“What’d you find?” Jester shouts, already moving at a jog towards them. A short discussion later and they were waving Caleb over. There’s a small silver disk and a glass ball of liquid metal, emitting a soft orange glow consistent with Conjuration enchantments. Four pink crystals in copper coils rest around the edge. Likely a stabilizing agent, he thinks.

“Can you figure it out, Caleb?” Nott asks, tugging at his coat. “Be careful not to touch it. Can you do it without touching it? Is that a thing you can do?”

Caleb’s thoughts drift for a moment. Trent’s voice in his mind whispers that they don’t want to waste resources on bringing him back a fifth time tonight if it turns out to be dangerous. “Ja... Ja, I can do that.”

He sits cross-legged in front of the rocks and removes the chalk from his coat. Third pocket on the left, just as always. It’s 4:51 now.

The circle he draws around it is a bit wonky. It has to be to go around the rocks without disturbing this strange device, but the sigils need to at least be correct. He reaches for the threads of magic that string the air, and plucks each in order as he whispers the words that make them vibrate within him.

The knowledge comes to him slowly when he draws the ritual out like this, but it takes so much less power. Dawnfather knows, he’s got none left to spare. So useless during that fight. He was so powerless to resist the succubus. It hadn’t helped that she’d sounded just like Astrid.

The magic chimes and he sits a little straighter. “It’s called an Abyssal Anchor.” He says out loud. There’s still more to uncover, but he’s gotten better at giving the information away to his friends bit by bit as he understands it, rather than keeping it to himself. He trusts them. He does. They wouldn’t turn on him like she said. It’s 4:56. Get the pearl out now. Counterclockwise strokes over the eighth sigil until the next chime. Follow the steps.

Beau is telling the rest of them something about the Betrayer Gods and history, but he can’t break focus now. There’s a chime. “It tears open portals to a specific plane. There’s a very complicated planar binding spell inverted to create an instability here.” He says, his eyes closed as he starts the next phase of the ritual. The owl feather. First pocket on the right, just under the shoulder. He sweeps its across the drawn circle and erases two of the sigils. The quill shaft glows and matches the pink of the stabilizing crystals. It’s 4:59. Almost done, Widogast.

 _But you’re not Widogast at all, are you?_ Trent’s voice is so sleek and oily, just as it ever was. _They saw Bren tonight. Back from the dead. So ready to do what needs to be done to traitors. At least this time… your loved ones got to look you in the eyes as they burned…_

“Stop!” He shot up from his position, the feather and pearl falling from his hands. The Nein were alive, standing feet away, and looking at him with wide eyes.

“Caleb?” Nott said tentatively, “Are you… ok?”

“The Abyss!” He barks. He grins, trying to hide his hard breathing. “The, uh… the rift. It went to Abyss.”

“Yeah, Caleb,” Beau says, her hands on her hips as she leans forward to look at him, “We figured that after you said it was an Abyssal Anchor.”

Oh. Right.

“Well, uh, doch. Ja.”

“So how do we turn it off?” Caduceus asks, turning back to the Nein. It looks like they had started this conversation without him while he was still casting. “I’m happy for it to be proof, but it should be _off_.”

“We could put it in the Haversack.” Nott suggests.

“It opens rifts, won’t it let in more monsters?”

“What if there are monsters in the bag?”

“Would they suffocate?”

“Would they break it?”

“The bag’s not really a dimension, could it open a hole in it, Caleb?”

Everyone stops their arguing to turn to him. He’s the expert now. He did his ritual. He should know. They’re still looking to him for help, and he needs to have the answers. He straightens his coat and puts the pearl and the feather back in their respective pockets before he answers.

“We should just leave it here for now. These rifts take time to open, nothing so big will come through again tonight. I can make the bubble over there,” He points across the cavern, “And we will be safe to sleep until some of us have recovered enough power to deal with it.”

“I wanna keep an eye on it,” Fjord said, “we’ll make it part of keeping watch tonight.”

“I think it’s better if we have some distance, just in case a scary demon arm shoots out of it while we’re sleeping!” shrieked Nott.

“We gotta keep an eye on it, you little-”

“That’s enough for tonight, I think.” Caduceus sighs. “We’ll all feel much better in the morning. I can make some tea before bed, if anyone likes. There’s a few new flavors around I’d like to try.”

Caleb hastily lit a fire and started the chant to erect Leomund’s Tiny Hut, pulling the small crystal bead from his first pocket on the left and speaking the command words that let it soak in the ambient magic and grow into their bubble. He was worried that it might have shown on his face how eager he was to be useful, to make even a start at reparations after what he had done earlier, but it hardly mattered. No one would maintain eye contact with him for very long anyway.

* * *

 

It’s 6:17 in the morning when Caleb feels a tail jostle him awake.

He and Yasha both were laying at the edge of the hut. He figured she was feeling as guilty as he was about almost killing the rest of their friends, and then having the gall to sleep in close quarters with them. However, the hut could only hold so many people and with the addition of Nugget’s snoring form, it was a tight enough fit that Jester’s tail caught his sleeve as she stood up.

He rolls over to face her, expecting that she was merely getting up to go find some privacy, but is surprised. She has her armor on, and her shield is in her hand, and the Haversack over her shoulder.

“Jester?” He whispers. “What are you doing?”

She glances down and seems to experience several emotions upon seeing him awake, before settling her face into a frown. “I think Nott was right about that thing,” she says, gesturing with her shield-hand to the Abyssal Anchor sitting just outside the bubble. “We should move it or something. It makes me nervous just sitting there.”

Caleb sits up and rubs his eyes and doesn’t notice that for a moment she flinched when he moved. “Ja, okay,” he mumbles. “I can’t leave the bubble, but I’ve got enough power left for maybe one or two spells if you need cover.”

Jester swallows and nods, seemingly conflicted about his help. Caleb’s stomach falls. He knows that face. It’s the same one Nott wore when they found the blood in Yeza’s lab. She didn’t trust him anymore. Trent was right. She saw him for Bren, and Bren got what he deserved: isolation. His eyes fell to the rocky floor that he had been sleeping on moments before and suddenly it looked an awful lot like the grimy cobblestones of the asylum. The snores of his teammates around him became the groans and moans of the other helpless and twisted figures in cells beside him. He was a failure and a liar and a murderer and-

“Caleb!” From the other side of the cave, Jester called to him. When did she get over there? The anchor was dangling between her hands as she held it aloft by threads from her sewing supplies. “Do you think this is far enough away?”

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he had a right to, if she was calling him by that name. Did Caleb still exist? He was Bren again, surely. Especially to her.

Jester looked at him expectantly for a few moments before scoffing and rolling her eyes when he remained silent. “Maybe I should just put it in the bag.”

Caleb meanwhile, (or was it Bren?) was drawing lines in the dirt at his feet. A similar calming exercise he had used in the asylum to ground himself. Draw the runes, count the beats, repeat the eight schools of magic (but no, there were nine now?). Dunemancy, this strange new school that Trent was so interested in. The ninth (the mighty nein). What was there really that he needed to focus on? The team ( the nein) didn’t need Bren. No one needed Bren, no one trusted Bren, no one _should_ trust Bren. Jester was perfectly capable of handling this anchor thing herself with-

“The bag!” he shouted, his head spinning to look at Jester, his eyes wild, his mouth wide open. The words were already leaving his lips and his fingers deftly tracing runes in the air over his feet as he felt the magic speed him up. Caleb leapt to a stand and took off at a dead sprint across the cavern, but Jester was already lowering the anchor into the waiting haversack and he couldn’t let her do that, couldn’t let this happen, it didn’t _work_ like that, the magic doesn’t _work_ like-

Caleb was 10 feet from her when the anchor crossed the boundary of the bag’s opening. A device designed to tear open extradimensional spaces and create rifts entered the space of a storage demiplane, and as Caleb had just recalled seconds previously, magic does not work like that.

The strangest thing, he would decide later on, is that the whole process was silent, except for his and Jester’s screams. The act of the planes snapping apart into a funnel at the maw of this innocent pink bag made no sound at all. The visual however, was stunning.

Like a collapsing star, space folded in on itself over and over, like someone had pinched reality in that spot and overlapped it. The runes stamped into the leather of the bag shredded themselves, and the ones carved haphazardly into the anchor folded and crunched inwards, like a tin can.

Jester’s shriek mixed with his own, and Caleb turned in time to see Nott’s terrified eyes meet his from across the cave, the bubble gone now that he had left it. There was no time to say anything though, as the collapsed space burst like a balloon and sucked everything towards it. Caleb’s last sight before blacking out was Jester’s hand taking his.

 

It is 6:25 in the morning in the city of Assarius. The sun was rising.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our duo wake up and find themselves in a whole new world.

He’s dreaming. 

There’s a house on fire in front of him, and two sets of hands at his shoulders, trying to pull him away, but he won’t turn. Not yet,  _ please  _ not yet, he needs to watch, he needs to know if somehow… if they got out. Trent will make him chase them down, but maybe he could lose them in the woods, if he shepherds them that way. He wants them to get away, right? If he drives them towards the deeper section of the woods… chases them… If he pursues his terrified mother with fire in his hands and as much fake rage as he can stomach burning in his eyes… maybe they’ll understand, and they’ll get away. 

A charred timber beam shifts from its position blocking the door and Bren glimpses a hand on it, the flames licking at its blackened, flaky skin. The hand is followed by an arm, and then a shoulder, a torso, a head. It’s Jester. Her dress is gone, burned, as is much of her skin. Her blue hue is barely recognizable through the sheen of blood and the cracked blackened flesh left clinging to her. Her hair is still on fire, but her horns appear untouched, curled and silhouetted against the blaze. It’s scarily demonic, and for a moment Bren is taken aback by the stark contrast from his normally cheerful blueberry. 

“I’m not your anything, Bren!” Jester yells out across the illuminated lawn, as if she could read his mind. “You used me, you used all of us, and you burned us!”

He shakes his head but is completely unable to look away from her horrifying visage, her bright violet eyes still perfectly intact and glaring daggers into him. He takes a step back and almost trips. It feels like a body behind him. He breaks his eye contact and looks down.

It’s Caduceus that he almost tripped on. The firbolg’s arms are splayed out and charred black. His lower body is laying over top of Beauregard’s, also scorched. Their clothes are hardly recognizable, and their faces even less so, but he knows them. They’re his friends. He… he didn’t mean to.

Fjord is several feet away, his body thrown over Nott’s like he died shielding her. Shielding her from him. They both are missing eyes, melted right out of their skulls. Yasha kneels beside them, still alive, still fighting. 

“I should’ve cut you down when I could.” She whispers, tears streaking her face, her rage burnt out.

His throat feels full, and he’s struggling to breathe, to speak, because it feels like if he opens his mouth he would only scream.

He tears his eyes away to look for Astrid or Wulf. Or Trent. They would help him, this wasn’t supposed to happen, it was just supposed to be his parents that he betrayed. That he murdered. But when he looks around, there she is again. Jester, or at least the shambling burned version of her, standing right in front of him. She’s framed against the fire light and she stands ready, her axe in hand, like an avenging angel here to strike him down for his sins.

“You’ve got to stop this, Caleb.” She whispers, and he looks down to see his hands are still alight with crackling fire, still streaming forth to cause more devastation. He meets her eyes again with a horrified expression.

“I… I don’t know how.”

She seems resigned, as if expecting that answer when she raises her axe above her head. 

_ “Light them up, pretty…” _

“NO!” Caleb jolts upwards, his hands finding the ground immediately as he empties his stomach. He’s mildly surprised when the contents of his dinner float instead.

He takes a minute to compose himself, his hands clamped to his heaving stomach, and rocks back onto his knees. The ground is a strange salt-and-pepper sandstone, and as he looks around, his jaw drops. More islands float through the air, all of them dazzling combinations of colored rock and mineral. Several stretch on for what looks like miles, and other are as small as his Hut. Various sundries float through space as well, coins and rations, donuts and papers, jade statues and quills all drift lazily through the empty air and collide with each other. 

There were several giant discs of light in the sky. Exactly twenty three, actually, though some overlapped. The myriad of different colored lights they gave off was like having a dozen suns from all different angles. There were no shadows cast at all, and it made everything feel distinctly wrong.

Caleb forced himself to his feet, and then threw out a hand to stop himself from falling over. The gravity here was… odd. He winced at a sharp pain in his back, and stretched his arms, windmilling slightly to steady himself and tried again to get his bearings. Take inventory. What time is it?

His eyes crashed open. Oh  _ gott. _ What time is it?! He’d never not known the time before. It was a vital part of how his spells worked. He needed to have the timing down perfectly or he couldn’t defend himself. He couldn’t center himself, couldn’t calm himself, couldn’t help himself, couldn’t- 

Oh god. Oh no. Ok. Ok. What was he going to do? What  _ could  _ he do? He could build a clock, but he’d need to scavenge for parts, and who even knew what was here? He could try to enchant an orb of time, but he’d almost certainly screw it up if he didn’t know exactly when to erase the Sylvan Glyph of Third Change drawn in powdered kissed bay leaf! He’d never realized just how delicate his magic was.

Think fast, Widogast. Where was he? No idea. 

How did he get here? Haven’t a clue.

Where was the rest of the Mighty Nein? Not around here, that’s for sure. 

What was the last thing he remembered? They had gone to sleep after defeating the fiends. He and Yasha had quietly forgiven each other, but the rest of the Nein were too preoccupied with…

The Anchor! The Haversack!  _ Oh gott, Jester! _

“Jester!” He called out, springing forward along the sandstone island he had found himself. His feet pounded against the gritty rock extraordinarily slowly, and he instinctively began tracing Arcturus’s Fourth Rune of Grace to cast Expeditious Retreat before he hesitated. Could he get the timing right on the incantation? He waited too long to start, and the words sputtered on his lips out of sync with the humming he had begun in the air. The spell fizzled, and Caleb cursed. 

“Jester!” He tried again, still running as fast as his normal  _ mundane  _ legs could carry him. 

“Caleb?!” A faint call met his ears. Jester’s voice, far away,  _ too  _ far away. 

“I’m coming!” He called, “Keep talking!”

“Caleb! Are you ok?” He focused on her voice, doing his best to locate its source. “Caleb? Where are you? Where are we?! What happened to everybody else?” 

There! An outcropping of rock on the floating island above him. It was drifting slightly, moving at a glacial pace, but perhaps thirty feet above him. Too far to jump, even with this gravity. He must have appeared with her and fallen from the ledge. Well, that explained the pain in his back.

“Jester! Down here!” He cupped his hands around his mouth to yell up to her. “Can you get down? Did you rest enough to cast spells again?”

Her head peeks out over the edge and Caleb is momentarily caught off guard with relief that it isn’t charred and sloughing skin. Her eyes are wide and vibrant and staring straight through him, however. 

“No! I’ve only got like two left in me, so I’d appreciate if you could come  _ get  _ me, please! It’s very drafty up here, and my dress is torn.” She snarks, and his worry melts. She’s ok.

He concentrates on the process to teleport up to her, focusing his energy on casting Misty Step. There’s no interlocking components here, just an incantation, and a jump. Easy. He can do this.

He allows the words to slip from his lips, meaningless in any language but arcane, and a swirl of fog gathers around his legs. Just a single step forward… and his vision is obscured by mist for just a millisecond and he’s standing in front of Jester’s bright eyes and she’s-oh. Oh, she’s hugging him. That’s… odd.

Her arms are wrapped around him and he tentatively reaches around to pat her back. It’s been a long time since he’s been hugged and he doesn’t quite remember the protocol. 

“Uh… there, there…?” He tries.

“I’m waiting for you to teleport us out of here, Caleb.” She says from over his shoulder, and he can almost hear her eyes rolling.

“Oh. Ja, doch. Uh… I can’t do that.” He stammers. 

She lets go and without stepping back from his personal space looks him in the eye. 

“What.” She deadpans. “Why did you teleport up here if you couldn’t get me down?”

“Uh… well…” He rubs the back of his head. He doesn’t think  _ ‘my first thought was to see you’  _ would be a good answer.

“I thought it would be better… to climb up. Together.”

“Up?” Jester repeats, turning to look up the side of the island that her outcropping juts out of. It’s a very steep climb, and not a short distance. 

“Ja, we’ve made some pretty extreme climbs before. Getting into Xhorhas was a bit of a… y’know… that was… fun.”

“Fun? You think this is fun, Caleb?” Her brows fall and now she’s glaring at him and he feels his blood curdle under her stare. 

“No! No, no, of course not! We’re stranded and alone, how could that be fun? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I was only- oh, scheisse. Entschuldigung.”

Jester looks like she experiences several emotions in a split second before her face settles on a soft smile.

“Ok, I guess we can climb. I’ve got you if you fall, but I’m still pretty tired. I didn’t get much sleep before that thing with the bag happened.” Her smile fades and she cocks her head. “What  _ did  _ happen, Caleb? I remember you shouting and then there was this like ‘BAM,’ ‘BOOM,’ explosion!”

“It was silent, Jester.” He allows a small smile.

“Well, yeeaah, ok, but it  _ looked _ like a big loud explosion.”

“How about we talk while we climb? It’s a very long explanation about magic and the Pyxis Postulates of the pre-calamity web theory and how that interacts with the planar boundaries of the Weave.” Caleb suggested, already searching the outcropping’s wall for suitable foot and handholds.

“That’s a lot of words I don’t know, Caleb, is this going to be boring?”

“I can try to make it interesting, I suppose.”

* * *

The pair had made it almost three quarters of the way to the top of the cliff wall. Jester was a fair distance ahead of him thanks to her significant upper body strength. She hadn’t wanted to leave him in her dust, but he had seen her impatience and insisted, asserting that he could always Misty Step in mid air back towards the wall. She had acquiesced with only a mumbled warning to not look up her skirt, and then had shot up the wall faster than Fjord running from ghosts. His explanation about theoretical technomancy in the meantime was a good distraction for him, recounting the lessons of his youth, but he was drawing to a close on them now, after almost twenty minutes of climbing.

“So does that make sense?” Caleb asked, panting from the unusual dual exertion of giving a lecture while free-climbing.

“Um. Maybe just give me a summary?” Jester calls down to him. “Less than a thousand words?”

He rolls his eyes and drives his boot into another loose foothold, pulling himself upwards another painful twelve inches. 

“So you know the Weave, right? The thing I just talked about at length? Source of all magic?”

“Sure, yep.” She chirps, accidentally kicking more rock dust into his hair.

“It’s literally in the air. Like strands of it. As if it was literally a weave. I’ve trained to know exactly where to pluck at it. And like, which words and runes make it vibrate.” Speaking in long sentences was starting to escape him after this much exertion.

“Why do you need to make it vibrate, you weirdo?” Jester teased from above.

“It’s music, blueberry.” He grins. “Magic is like music, and that’s why there’s such a career out there for the musically talented. Not me, I’m afraid. I could never carry a tune.”

“I’m sure you sing very lovely, Caleb.”

He clears his throat. He’s blushing from the exertion, certainly. It’s the exertion. “Anyway, uh…” he huffs, pulling himself further upwards, “Wizards learn to manipulate the weave with our fingers and tongues- don’t  _ laugh  _ it sounds less weird in Zemnian- and Bards learn to play music which resonates with the Weave. The other option is being born with it.”

Jester stifles her giggles. “Yeah, you said that earlier. What does that even mean?”

“So like, if you’re imagining the Weave is a great big invisible web of yarn, then imagine in some points it gets super condensed and shapes itself into a yarn doll.”

“What is a yarn doll?” She giggles.

“You didn’t take your mother’s balls of yarn as a child and bunch it into the shape of a person?”

“No, Caleb, I bought a real doll.” She laughs, but he can see the way her face twists as soon as the words leave her mouth. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking-”

“It’s fine, Jester, I grew up poor. I know.”

She’s silent for a moment, the only sound the repeated brush of leather against the rough stone walls.

“So these yarn dolls, huh? They must be pretty strong if they’re made of the Weave.”

“Well, ja, they would be the gods.”

“Oh. So the Traveller is just a big yarn doll?”

“A yarn doll with sentience and a history, yes, I suppose.” Caleb busies himself with finding the next handhold so as to not think about the great insult he’s offering to the ego of every deity in the multiverse.

“It’s more than that though, there’s also demons and devils, dragons, primordials, sylvans, trolls, und so weiter. Lots of monsters. Anything with inherent magic is basically a yarn doll, but some are bigger than others.”

“Sort of like dicks, then.” 

“Yes, sort of like di- what?” He’s so taken aback he almost misses his next hold.

“Well, you know.” He can’t see her face anymore, but by the sound of her voice, she’s smirking and very likely fucking with him. “Some are bigger than others. Mama says they can be magic. Lots belong to monsters.”

He fell silent. It was a joke, of course it was. She wasn’t calling him a monster, but nevertheless, his keen mind kept going back to the way she looked at him last night when he had offered his help.

“I’m sorry about yesterday. The fireball. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

This time she actually does miss a handhold. Jester lets out a yelp and falls downward, but thankfully slow enough that she can grab hold again, thanks to the gravity here.

“Jester!” Caleb calls out, the incantation for Misty Step on the tip of his tongue again.

“I’m ok!” She calls down, righting herself. 

Once again, he climbs in silence for a moment before starting to talk again. “When I was charmed, I-”

“I’d reeeally rather not talk about it, Caleb.” She said definitively. He fell silent again, and a moment later, she tried, “Tell me about these dolls some more.” 

“Well… there are people who have intrinsic magic, and there are gods that do, and monsters, and other powerful entities. Some of them have enough to share, and that’s what you are.”

“I’m mooching yarn?” She teases, and he’s glad to hear that playful tinge in her voice again.

“It’s partially yours now, actually. It’s like if the yarn doll took part of its yarn and then tied it to a sewing needle and pushed it through you. You’ve got some of its yarn now.”

“Ouch, Caleb, that sounds painful and gross. The Traveller would never stab me with a needle.” 

He chuckles and focuses on the next leap upwards he has to make.

“You told me something about a pixie too right?” She speaks up again a minute later.

“Pyxis Praxum, yes, he’s a documented technomancer.”

“Yeah sure, what was that about?”

“Well a very long time ago, a great wizard named Pyxis thought that the Weave might be-”

“What makes him a great wizard?”

“He - what?”

“Just, like, you’re a pretty good wizard. Are you a great wizard?”

“No, I am not a great wizard, great wizards usually have to be recorded in history for their deeds... or their hypotheses or their research, or for inventing spells.”

“You’ve invented spells though, you write down new ones all the time!”

“I’m just figuring out how to do things that other wizards have invented, Jester. It is not so very special” He dodges out of the way of another wave of sand that she kicked out above him. 

“Hmm. I don’t think so.” She says, “You still have to start from scratch, you just have an idea for the finished product. I bet I could give you ideas and then you could invent all kinds of spells!”

Caleb ducked his head and smiled into his scarf. “That sounds wonderful, Jester, and maybe someday when we get back.”

They’re almost to the top, and he can see Jester is about to pull herself up over the edge.

“Why wait? We’ve certainly got nothing else to do.” She grunts, pulling herself over the last ridge. She vanishes from his view for a few seconds, before her head pops over the side and she hangs her arms down, waiting to help him up.

“It’s very kind of you, Jester, but I’m afraid I’m having a bit of trouble with my spells at the moment.”

“Do you need to rest? You’re almost at the top!”

“No, it’s not that, I got a long rest last night. I feel very refreshed.” He pants. 

Her brow furrows again, but she asks, “So what’s the problem?”

He reaches up and can almost grab her hand. One more pull then. “I can’t keep time anymore. I don’t know what time it is.”

Her fingers grasp his and he feels the familiar glow of healing as she whispers a prayer to the Traveller. With no wounds to patch up, the adrenaline boost lets him kick off the wall and drive straight up the last few feet into Jester’s arms.

With both of them safely horizontal again, they roll away from the edge and breathe heavily, Caleb splayed slightly over top of her sheild arm.

“What’s… the problem…. with that?” Jester breathes.

“I need to know… the right time to apply the next steps of the spells. You know… great wizard stuff.” 

“Can’t you just like… count? You’re good at counting, and that’s all time is, really. Just start over from the beginning, and say that when you woke up, it was zero o’clock!” She stares up at him expectantly, smiling like he is missing something obvious.

Oh.  _ Oh! _ He is! He knows exactly how long it took to climb that cliff. He knows how long it’s been since he woke up! He hasn’t lost his sense of time at all, it’s just got a portion  _ missing _ !

“Oh, Jester, liebling, you have just said something wonderful!” He grins like a madman and reaches into his coat, pulling out a capped vial of phosphorous. Second pocket on the right. He reaches out and with practiced ease snaps a string in midair right where he knows it should be as he uncorks the vial. He revels in the vibration in his chest as the Weave responds to his touch, and as he shouts the incantation, the phosphorous leaps from the vial, spinning itself in midair into four glowing orbs of dancing light. 

Caleb lets out a whoop of joy, his eyes sparkling as he makes them spin above him, doing synchronized tricks as he spins his fingers and whispers more arcane instruction, perfectly in time.

“Jester, you’ve saved my magic! It was so simple, I don’t know how to thank-”

He glances down, and becomes acutely aware that this whole exchange had taken place with him lying on top of her after rolling away from the edge. His face barely has time to become red however, before he notices that she is paying him no mind, her head turned just slightly to the right and looking behind him.

There’s a hot breath on the back of his neck, and a soft growl behind his ear. 

 

It is 0:29 on the Astral Plane. The natives are hunting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes I know Caleb doesn't actually know Misty Step, don't @ me.
> 
> I talk about the science of magic a lot, if you couldn't tell, and I am not liable to stop.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jester and Caleb have a fight

The world slowed down. It always did when there was danger around. Adrenaline flooded Caleb’s system and his heart rate increased. _Thump, thump, thump, thump._ He could track it perfectly, counting the beats of his heart just as he had control over his personal timekeeping again.

His mother used to say that Bren was schneller als ein Feldhase. Faster than a hare. Bren had lost a lot of that reaction time in the asylum, but Caleb was getting it back.

Before even taking the time to contemplate the move, he falls into an old pattern. _Threat. Enemy. Eliminate._ He lifts his right hand from beside Jester’s and raises it into Arcanist’s third position, his ring finger and thumb pressed together, wrist bent backwards at the precise angle. _Thump._ Time for the next gesture. His index finger and thumb fold down as he throws his arm backwards, and from Jester’s widening eyes and the slight shift of the shadow behind him, he can guess his sudden move was not appreciated. _Thump Thump._ The incantation now. The words leave him in a shout as he whips his head back to see the beast threatening himself and Jester.

He is face to face, mere inches away from a snarling sort of deformed lion thing. It is poised to attack, it’s mouth open and teeth shining with spittle, large eyes narrowed and slitted looking into his own. It has no time however. With the spell Caleb shouted, he can feel the Weave vibrating around him. Through him. It’s much more powerful here than he is used to, like all his life he had been plucking at lute strings that were being held down, and now he is free to hear them truly _resonate._

Caleb swings his arm around with a roar, and releases the three glowing sparks of power from his three extended fingers. The scorching rays leap forward, singeing his fingers and igniting into brilliant orange and yellow flames that rocket forward the remaining inches into the lion’s face.

“Caleb!” Jester shouts, rolling swiftly to the side, her arm hooked around him to rip him with her. He jerks away from where he was kneeling and watches with a grim satisfaction the way it’s fur curls and burns away. It’s momentarily distracted, howling in pain. Three streaks of missing and blackened flesh run parallel along its neck like claw marks, blood pouring from them and steaming hot.

Jester gets to her feet, trying to take a protective stance in front of him. Her axe is in her hand, held aloft in front of her, its blade glowing with the faintest green light.

The beast shook its head violently, whipping itself back and forth like it was trying to shake off something biting it, and Caleb took a moment to get a better look at it. It certainly wasn’t a lion. The body resembled one, but like it had been physically twisted. Each of the four legs appeared to corkscrew towards the paw, like a wound-up rag with giant claws. The body as well seemed to spiral. The creature was clearly hungry; it was thin enough to see its ribs, and they appeared to twist as well, crossing over each other like helixes down the beast’s sides. It’s head was almost too large for its body, but the muzzle was certainly full of enough teeth to justify it. Its eyes were massive, set back into its face too far apart and too far above the muzzle to look natural, they almost seemed to face opposite directions. That sort of trait was usually much more common in prey creatures than predators…

“Jester,” Caleb whispered, tugging at her sleeve. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“I’ve got this, Caleb,” she assured him, her voice low, still watching the beast intently. “Conserve your spells. You need to rest.”

“You don’t understand. That beast is not the biggest fish in these parts. There will be something around here that feeds on _it!”_

Jester’s mouth fell open for a moment before settling again into a firm line. “Then let’s beat this fucker into monster bait so whatever _that_ is won’t be chasing us.”

Caleb watched her grip tighten on the axe as she swung it upwards, her other hand going to her holy symbol. Her mouth moved in what he assumed must be a silent plea to the Traveler, and then the hand gripping the small carved archway around her neck began to darken. Green waves of clearly necrotic power washed off her fist and swirled with the black shadows she held in her palm.

In a single swift motion, he watched with his jaw hanging open as Jester heaved her axe forward, releasing it at the perfect point of her arc and sending it flying end over end and burying the head into the beast’s torso, but she didn’t stop there. In the same movement she had leapt to the side and took three, four, five quick steps forward, plunging her arm forward and wrapping the shifting power in her palm around the beast’s throat, directly under the marks he had made across it’s flesh. There was a surge of… _something_ in the air. _Thump — Thump._

Caleb checked his timing. His heart had definitely skipped. Worry about that later. The green crackling light that had been illuminating Jester’s arm had vanished, pouring into the beast and now illuminating its veins from the inside out. Jester released it and moved to dig her axe out of it’s ribcage, no doubt ready to take another swing, but the beast wasn’t quite done.

Howling in pain as its flesh started to peel itself away, it raised a paw with four massive claws, each clearly sharp enough to rend flesh, and swiped at Jester as she moved away. Caleb couldn’t make a Shield around other people, he hadn’t figured it out, but he tried. He threw out both arms and slammed his hands together into a protective triangle.

“Jester!” He screamed, willing the magic to please, _please_ work.

It didn’t.

The deep cloister sound that the Weave makes when it resonates in abjuration rang throughout his whole core. But the Shield melted into place around him, and not her.

The beast’s paw raked downwards and scraped the back of her studded leather, catching the straps. Two of the claws dug inwards, gripping at the fabric and flesh just underneath the armor and tearing them away. Jester yelped as she was knocked forward, away from where her axe was still stuck. Blood splashed outwards, taking two heartbeats longer than it should have to hit the ground thanks to the gravity here. It hung in the air like a gruesome curtain between Caleb and the beast.

She was out of spells. The Traveler couldn’t help her any more until she rested, or it would be too much for her to channel. Too much divine strength in too little time. She was alone.

Caleb stood. Or Bren did. He wasn’t sure who he felt like in that moment. The shade of a memory played before him of Astrid falling prone under Wulf’s reluctant whip while Trent watched. Jester’s blood looked more crimson, outlined against the multicolored sky behind her. It was starting to bubble, even, as it fell. Her blood spray arced through the air, but it was almost… steaming? Boiling? Was that a trait of tieflings? He didn’t think so, and he hadn’t seen it before. It was certainly taking a long time to hit the ground. Why was he just staring, he should be doing something, helping her!

His chin cocked downwards, trying to decide which spell he could cast fast enough to save her. A spark caught his eye. His hands were already extended. When had that happened? The air was rippling in waves of visible heat like the hottest day he could ever recall as a child. His fingers were in Arcanist’s Power Hold, both hands. That’s not supposed to be a stable spell position. He certainly wouldn’t attempt something so foolhardy, and what was that damned _sound?_ A single loud roar was piercing the air, and his chest hurt. Him then, maybe. Screaming. That made sense. How many heartbeats had it been? _Thump._ One.

The rippling air warbled and the sparks leaping off his hands appeared to be continually igniting small pockets of the compressed oxygen by his fingers, scorching him with miniature explosions. The Weave was _singing_ in a way he was very familiar with, a song he had once lived for. _Fire._ The truest of evocation, strumming the Weave into pure energy and directing its song into a single point. Except this point seemed to be massive, and all around him. Releasing this spell would almost certainly hurt.

_Good._

_Thump._ Two. Jester’s blood hit the ground. Time sped back up. His scream was still tearing out of him. _Thump._ Three. The oxygen pockets were getting smaller, denser. If he tried to breathe at the moment, he had no doubt he wouldn’t be able to. The Weave’s song was increasing in pitch, rising to a high wailing keen. His fingers were trembling. The flesh had been scorched almost completely off his left index. _Thump._ Four.

He let go.

His arms blew backwards from the force of the explosion as several dozen bombs lit up the air around him like a minefield. His vision dissipated as his retinas burned with white-hot spots, and the shooting pain in his ears told him his eardrums had certainly burst. There was no end to the pain that rippled through him below the neck either. He was being ricocheted back and forth between pockets of explosive force, each one searing another brand against him.

He had become much more hearty since his time with the Nein, getting some of his old strength back, but he could only curse it in this instance, begging he could pass out and shut out the pain.

 _You deserve this, though._ A voice, clear cut through the pounding agony. _This is what your friends felt when you lit them up. Accompanied by a hearty sense of betrayal because they trusted you. Foolish mistake, really. Who would put their life in Bren Ermundrud’s soot and blood-covered hands? In Caleb Widogast’s shaky fingers, unable to commit? It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you tell people your name is. You’re the same scared liar, the same torturer’s lap dog. You’re too attached to the song of fire, and now you’ll burn for it._

His head hit the ground. The pain at this point was indistinguishable from the rest of the scalding burns covering his body. One eye cracked open, but his vision was still too spotty. He thought he saw the creature fall. He hoped so. There was another shape too, a blue one. Running towards him. He really hoped it was Jester and not whatever predator would be hunting this beast.

 _Thump… Thump..._ Well… at least that still worked. He let his eyes close, and slipped into unconsciousness.

 

* * *

 

It had been one hell of a day for Jester. She had lost a fight to an ogre in a bar, watched a bugbear have a wet dream, had two of her friends try to kill her, brought another friend back to _life_ , and then blew up her favorite bag she had ever had. Now, seemingly stranded in this void of rainbow skies and floating islands, all she wanted to do was draw them, but her sketchbook had been _in_ the bag when it exploded, so she couldn’t even do _that_.

She considered herself lucky that Caleb had at least gotten caught in the explosion with her. If she had woken up here alone, she would’ve been in a lot of trouble. Caleb knew a bunch of stuff though, and he was sure to keep them out of too much trouble. At least until the Traveler came and got her. But now Caleb was being all weird.

He had been flinching away from her the whole time they were climbing the cliff. Briefly she wondered if he was still mad at her for attacking him while he was charmed, but that would be silly. Caleb wouldn’t hold a grudge like that, right? Of course not. Probably.

Now though, _finally_ they had gotten to the top of the rock face. He was still climbing though, his hand just barely within her reach. She leaned down and took it, whispering as she did so that _hey Traveler it would be really cool and stuff if you helped him out,_ momentarily revelling in the familiar sensation of his healing magic rushing through her. It always felt so nice, like dunking just her hand and her heart into a warm bath.

Caleb’s grip tightened very suddenly in response and she heaved him up after her, his skinny body falling all over her like an uncoordinated mess. It was kind of fun actually, like that time she made Bluud wrestle with her.

They sit there a moment and talk. Apparently Caleb is having spell trouble, and she’s his cleric, she should be able to fix it.

“Can’t you just like… count?” She suggests.

When Caleb gets that huge manic grin on his face and casts his Dancing Lights like it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, Jester smiles. Maybe it is, to him. Magic is such an important part of who he is, and she got to give it back to him!

Still beaming up at him, she turns her head to follow one of the lights that he sends careening off into a pinwheel trick. Her eyes slide downward and her breath catches. There’s a huge… something creeping towards them, having nearly made it to Caleb’s back. It almost looks like Nugget, if he was like, _huge_ and _evil_ and made of _taffy_. She starts frantically patting Caleb’s torso where he’s still sitting atop her, trying to get his attention quietly.

“Jester, you’ve saved my magic!” Caleb cheered, unaware of the thing behind him. “It was so simple, I don’t know how to thank-” he cuts off. His eyes have met hers and she’s trying to silently signal him to teleport them when something… _happens._

She’s seen him happy before, and she’s seen him in the fury of battle. She’s even recently been on the other side of his wrath, through no fault of his own. She’d never been looking into his eyes and watched his soft blue twinkle and laugh lines transform into a hard stare, a dropped brow, and a cold, calculating gleam. It was… well, she’d think about what it was later.

Just as she began to open her mouth to formulate a plan, or whisper to _just teleport us away already, Caleb_ he was already moving. His hand whipped outwards and without looking back to aim, he spun three bolts of fire into the beast’s neck.

That _idiot,_ he was going to piss it off! They didn’t even have Yasha or Beau here to draw its attention; he was going to get himself killed and she was fresh out of diamonds, not to mention spells!

“Caleb!” She cried, grabbing him by the collar and rolling sideways, dragging him underneath her. She pulled herself to her feet, forcing him behind her.

When he sputtered something about there being bigger predators around, she set her jaw in determination. She had been ready to die for her friends earlier. She supposed she could die for just Caleb too.

“Then let’s beat this fucker into monster bait so whatever _that_ is won’t be chasing us.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Traveler, I know you’re pretty insistent on a spell limit per day for my _safety_ or whatever but I’m _pretty sure_ I’ve got one left. Give me all you’ve got.”

Jester shivered when the sensation of his necrotic energy ran down each of her fingers, coating each one like oil. Like her fist had been plunged into a ice cold bath of sludge and stung by a thousand mosquitos. She grit her teeth. It would bother this bastard a whole lot more.

Her axe left her hand and spun in the air towards the creature’s side, but she couldn’t afford the time to watch and see if it landed. She sidestepped and ran forward, closing the distance she had created and wrapped her hand around its face, digging her fingers into the melted skin that Caleb had left. There was a pulse and a roar, and she knew that at least was a success. Before she could think about her next move, she had to retrieve her axe, and quickly strafed alongside its mangled body.

“Jester!” She heard Caleb call from behind her just as something sharp caught her just above the kidney. She fell to the ground before she even registered the pain, but she felt the hot splash of blood on her legs and knew it would be a deep wound. Her blood was unusually hot though. And Caleb was screaming.

She angled her head back to face him and gasped. Hundreds of glowing air pockets lit up the space around him, heat rolling off of him in waves. His eyes were wild and his arms bleeding and blackened from the blistering temperature.

The creature had left her on the ground, bounding forward toward him. It was so close, it was pouncing, it was _in the air,_ did he not _see—_

Caleb’s scream crescendoed into a roar as we ripped his arms apart and the world around him _detonated._ Jester couldn’t even see through the massive flash bang that filled her whole vision.

Seconds later felt like eternity as the blast cleared. Caleb was unmoving on the ground. So was the creature. Neither resembled themselves much anymore.

“Caleb!” She yelled, pushing herself to stand. The wound in her side gave an excruciating twang as she moved, but she forced herself onwards. She fell to her knees again at his side, one hand gripping her wound trying to apply pressure. Her other hand sought the symbol around her neck.

“Traveler, please, I know you’ve got rules, I know it’s bad for me or _whatever_ but please I need to help him. Let me heal him.”

She moved her hand down to his chest, almost pulling back immediately from the heat he was still radiating. She pressed her fingers downwards against him however, and _pushed_ for the magic.

Nothing happened.

“Traveler!” She yelled at nothing. “I _need_ this! I can’t be alone here carrying his _corpse_ back home until I find another d-diamond!” Saying it out loud, she choked up.

She pushed again, begging for a Cure Wounds, something, _anything_ to save him. Nothing happened.

“I can’t do this without him.” Jester whispered. “Please, Traveler, I need him.”

 _“....there will be consequences for this, you know?”_ His soft voice over her shoulder spoke.

“I don’t _care!_ Fix him!”

_“It will not be easy for me. Certainly not for you or him.”_

_“_ Do whatever you have to do, damnit, this is _Caleb_ we’re talking about!”

_“......I don’t want to lose you, you know. I’ve grown quite fond of—“_

“If you don’t fix him _right now_ I’m never worshipping you again!”

She didn’t know where the threat came from, but there were tears in her eyes and blood on her hands and it was mixing with his blood as she pushed into his chest, searching for any shred of this _yarn doll’s_ power that he had left in her, and she knew the threat was a sincere one.

She waited several seconds but the Traveler had no reply. Jester screamed in frustration. “FIX HIM!!”

If Cure Wounds felt like a warm bath, this felt like being dropped into a volcano.

Radiant power rushed through her whole body at a speed that it never had before. The normal golden glow of her healing magic was replaced by the same grass green color as her necrotic spells. She hoped that didn’t mean what she thought it meant. Even Revivify hadn’t felt like this. That had been like the Traveler holding her hand on a trip down the road; this was like being pushed off a cliff and hitting every rock on the way down.

Her eyes fluttered shut and she fell forward on top of him, the magic spent and done.

His skin had closed over, at least, as well as she could tell before beginning to black out. Her last thought as her head hit his chest was that maybe this was a _bit_ better than wrestling with Bluud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I meant to have more in this chapter than just combat. Oops.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caleb herds cats.

The shrill whistling in the air was not helping him sleep. 

Caleb grabbed for his pillow to roll over and stuff his face into the sound-muffling heaven that would bring him ten more minutes rest. Instead his hand smacked onto wet chainmail.

He pried his eyes open and looked around blearily.  _ Okay, Widogast, take inventory. _ The sky was still filled with multicolored strands of magic, and islands of all shapes and sizes floated past like clouds. His hair had fallen into his mouth a bit, which was odd; he had definitely just asked Yasha to help him cut it. His clothes felt bunched up underneath him, and he tried to roll over.

“Mmmghmmm…”

Oh. Jester was laying across his lower torso. Ok. Great. No problem.

And he felt nauseous.  _ Mein Gott, please do not let me throw up on Jester. _

He edged himself slightly over, trying to slip out from underneath her heavy armor-clad body enough to sit up. Sliding one arm free, he brushed the hair away and rubbed at his sore eyes. He remembered being attacked by something. 

Ah, yes that would probably be its body over there. Ghastly-looking thing. Now that he could get a better look at it with some time to consider, it looked like it was probably a wild Foo Lion. 

The world stopped spinning a bit as he stared, and he felt his headache, stomachache, bone ache…really  _ all _ aches begin to subside into manageable pain. That whistling sound was likely the remnant of an ear injury as well, he realized. He gave himself a shake of the head to clear the cobwebs, and finally decided that it would be best if he looked down at Jester now. He could hardly ignore her in his lap forever. 

Glancing down, his eyes snapped open as he realized the source of the wetness on her chainmail. The side of her torso was soaked in blood, still open from where the Foo Lion had gotten her. She was unconscious on top of him, bleeding out, and he had taken the time to  _ name the creature that mauled her _ .

He scrambled backwards out from under her, grasping her head and lowering her lightly onto the ground. His overcoat had long ago been treated in a wax that made it shed water and most blood, but it still held stains from where she laid on him. He tore through its pockets for his caterpillar cocoon. First one on the inside of his right breast. He needed more time.

The cocoon cradled in his palm, he spun the thumb of his right hand over it counterclockwise, muttering the words. The Weave thrummed around him with the melody of transmutation that he had grown so familiar with, but here, in this place, it was so much louder, and so much clearer, like an orchestra playing in the next room had finally allowed him inside. The cocoon unraveled itself in his palm, and he clapped his hands together, twisting them and scattering the strands of its magic towards Jester’s body. A billion minuscule fibers wrapped their way around her, encasing her in a momentary cocoon of magic before —

_ POP! _

The air cracked as it rushed to fill in the space left by the pressure vacuum of Jester’s body vanishing. Where her bleeding tiefling form had previously been, now there was a tiny blue kitten. More importantly, Jester was in a body where she wouldn’t be bleeding out for an hour, as long as he kept his concentration. 

Ok. Alright. He could do this. Just wake cat-Jester up, and then convince cat-Jester that she needed to heal herself once he changed her back. From being a cat. Jester was a cat, because she was bleeding out. His ability to hold onto a music note in his head was all that was keeping Jester from dying because they were all alone here.  _ Oh, Gott. _

He was panicking. He was going to lose his concentration. He threw his focus back into the feeling of the magic, viciously determined to keep the feeling of that hum familiar in his mind. He could not panic, not now. He could not afford it.  _ Jester  _ could not afford it. He was a hardened fighter, a wizard of skill and talent who would  _ not  _ be swayed just because his  _ best friend was bleeding out and only a thin cocoon of magic was keeping her from _ _ — _

_ “Meeew.” _

He glanced down at the kitten that was slumbering peacefully where he knelt in the dust. She yawned in her sleep and stretched out a tiny paw. Caleb allowed himself a momentary smile. Right. She was safe for the moment. He could do this for her.

With a snap of his fingers, Frumpkin appeared beside him.

“Hey, buddy,” he started. “We’re in a bit of a pickle here, actually. Do you think you can carry Jester without disturbing her too much? I want to give her as much rest as we can.”

Frumpkin mewled and trotted over to the kitten, looking at it with distaste.

“Oh come now, you’re the only cat for me.” Caleb rolled his eyes, busying himself with putting his cocoon away, focusing on his concentration and steadying his determination. The other components he had knocked out of the coat in his haste were scattered as well, and he placed each one back into his pockets with care while Frumpkin sniffed at his new charge.

Frumpkin picked Jester up by the scruff of her neck and returned very elegantly back to Caleb’s side, enjoying the praise but clearly feeling the need to emphasize his superiority. With a graceful leap that most cats would not attempt while holding a kitten, Frumpkin leapt up onto his master’s shoulders. He laid Jester’s soft kitten form gently against the back of Caleb’s neck, and she nuzzled into his scarf.

Caleb made a noise that sounded a bit like choking. “That is not what I meant by carrying her, you fuzzball.”

He reached up to adjust his scarf better and brush the hair out of his eyes again. It was definitely not this long last night. And his beard was longer too. Strange. Still, time to consider things later. He was right in his earlier assessment: there were predators much bigger than Foo Lions that inhabited the Astral plane. With one of them lying dead, something was sure to come and pick up the free meal, and soon. Best to be far away by then.

Caleb shared a look with Frumpkin. “So which direction is home, do you think?”

* * *

After exactly 45 minutes, Caleb had made a few discoveries about his new situation. He had been making use of Feather Fall to glide harmlessly between islands, but after a few uses of the spell, he found himself hardly any more tired than before he had cast it. His use of polymorph as well had done hardly anything to drain his strength. 

And then there was that spell he had cast before falling unconscious. After spending more than a few seconds awake and not extremely stressed out, he finally allowed his mind to think back. That had been extremely dangerous, and not any sort of spell that he’d been previously developing. He’d just…done it. Instinctually, throwing every power-boosting gesture and twist into it that he could in the moment. That was not a sustainable way to cast, and he was lucky that he wasn’t dead. He must have Jester to thank for that. Strange, he’d thought she was out of spells for the day. 

Gods had to be careful about how much of their power they gave out, Caleb knew. Too much could burn their clerics from the inside out. That was why divinities imposed the same limitations as the ones arcane casters suffered through. It was a good measure of what a mortal body could handle before the magic ate away too much at your stamina. 

Caleb, of course, was very good at counting, as Jester had pointed out. He was about as positive as he could be that Jester had been at her limit for casting, and was really hoping that her current condition was only due to being mauled, and not from overexerting her magic.

There were plenty of ways to fix being mauled, after all. But if she was suffering from a divine overdose... 

Regardless, he needed her to wake up, and his search for shelter had so far only turned up a large ragged tent that he had plucked out of the air floating past them. It looked like it would fit two people, but it had a large hole that he was fairly certain was the result of a large splash of acid. Still, with less than fifteen minutes remaining on his polymorph spell, and no better option presenting itself, Caleb reached into his pocket (second from the top on the left) to retrieve the components to summon his unseen servant.

Fashioning the string and wood together into a marionette’s cross-bar, he let it hang in midair, suspended between his palms as he looped his fingers into unseen puppet controls. An almost imperceptible weight dropped into his fingers as he completed the spell and Schmidt sprang into existence. 

“We’ve got a tent to set up, mein Kumpel," he said, throwing the canvas and poles to the ground. Gingerly lifting Jester from where she had curled up on the back of his neck, he set her onto the rock as well. “Frumpkin, try to wake Jester, if you can. Be gentle.” 

Caleb spent as much time throwing glances back at Frumpkin and Jester as he could while he and Schmidt erected the ramshackle tent. His cat had started pushing her back and forth along through the dust, but was still completely unsuccessful in waking her.

Four minutes, twenty-seven seconds left.

Caleb could not afford to panic. If Jester would not wake up, he would need to heal her himself. She was much better at medicine than he was, but his last healing potion would suffice in a pinch. The sudden rush of adrenaline that it brought with it would be jarring to her, but it would be good enough until she could sleep and heal her own wound.

Securing his grip on the last few minutes of his concentration, he reached into his coat for the potion that Nott had handed him before going down the well. He unstoppered it, enjoying for a moment the sickeningly sweet scent, before taking a deep breath and turning back to face Jester's non-responsive feline body. Gently scooping his hand underneath her, he carried her into the tent.

And stopped dead in his tracks.

Squatting on the ground, balancing on the balls of his feet, was a man in a dark forest-green cloak pulled closed and secured with a simple pin. His eyes matched his cloak, and glared daggers at Caleb. His mouth was pulled into a thin scowl and wrinkled unnaturally against the normal smile lines that were clearly present there. A scraggly ginger beard curled under his chin, where he was pressing his fingers tightly as he rested his head.

“You’re killing her.”

Caleb slipped.

The note fell out of his mind for just a moment, and suddenly Jester was in his arms. A full-sized, very heavy, armor-wearing, bleeding-out Jester.

Caleb fell to his knees as he did his best not to drop her.

“Help me!” he growled. “Wake her up! She is your cleric, is she not?”

“Actually,” the Traveler mused, without a trace of a smile, “I believe she made it quite clear that she was  _ your  _ cleric. You mattered more than me.”

Caleb was not listening. Jester was bleeding against his chest and her  _ god _ was squatting on the ground like a fool babbling about semantics and Jester was  _ dying. _

“Heal her!” he shouted. “There’s nothing I can do, I am not like her, I am not someone who saves people! I need you to help her!”

“She’s in channel shock.”

Caleb stalled. Blinked. “But she — ”

“She poured too much magic through her body at once. She surpassed the limit I gave her. Begged me to do it.”

“Why didn’t you say no?!” Caleb roared. “Gods  _ always  _ say no! It is your responsibility to not — \--”

“Do not tell me what I am responsible for when it comes to her, Caleb Widogast.” The Traveler’s voice cut through his protests with a cold chill, and it suddenly occurred to Caleb that he was screaming at a deity.

“What can I…what can I do?”

“You’ve only made it worse with your polymorph. She needs to recover naturally. The more magic she is exposed to, the harder it will be on her. Bind the wound.”

With a sinking feeling of guilt that he knew he did not have the time or energy to face at the moment, Caleb tentatively pushed his shaking fingers into the blood-soaked chainmail and peeled it away, trying to take as little skin with it as possible. Underneath the torn metal, Jester’s corset and shirt were in ribbons.

Caleb swallowed and removed his own shirt, using Jester’s axe to tear strips away from it. With these makeshift bandages prepared (anything else would have to wait until he could scavenge something better from the floating wastes), he glanced towards the Traveler and gestured at Jester.

“Can you help me lift her?”

“If I or my magic touch her, she will almost certainly lose two thirds of the nerves in her spine," he said calmly.

“ _ Scheisse. _ Great. Sorry, blueberry.”

He pushed her into a seated position, using his torso to keep her elevated while he did his best to remove her shirt.

“Really not the time to blush, Mr. Widogast.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

The job done and Jester’s bloody clothing out of the way, Caleb reached towards his coat for his needle and silver thread. This was going to be bloody work, and he was thankful that Jester was at least unconscious for it. The number of times that Astrid or Wulf had done this for him while awake…Well. They weren’t pleasant memories. Which meant that it was just his perfect luck when Jester stirred under his arms.

“...Caleb…?”

He froze, his needle hovering above her for the next stitch. “Ah. Jester?” he replied weakly.

She let out a sound that was like a burbling giggle and he knew that she was tasting blood. “Ha…you’re…touching my boobs. Ha…haa…” Her head lolled back and forth without the strength to pick it up.

“Well, you know,” he began, looking directly up at the roof of the tent, “Have to stop the bleeding. You know.”

“The…?” Jester pried her eyes open, doing her best to take in the scene. “Oh…I wouldn’t worry about it…The Traveler will heal me. He’s…” she yawned, “he’s like…super…cool…”

Her head slumped forward, once again dead weight, as she lost consciousness. Grimacing, Caleb finished his stitches and wrapped his shirt-scrap bandages around her torso. With his job finished and Jester resting as comfortable as he could make her, he shot another glance at the Traveler and stood to leave the tent.

Meeting him just outside, the Traveler gave him a sidelong glance as he looked out at the sea of islands. Neither spoke for several moments, until Caleb turned to him.

“Thank you for the advice. I would not have known she was suffering if you hadn’t told me.”

The Traveler cocked an eyebrow and flicked his eyes up and down Caleb’s body. He let a quiet huff and snapped his fingers. 

A torrent of ice cold water crashed down onto Caleb’s head.

“Pffbbt!!” he sputtered. “Wha-what was that for?!”

“You were bloody.”

“Prestidigitation works fine too!”

A small corner of the Traveler’s scowl curled upwards into a faint grin.

“I do see why she likes you," he said, the playful lilt back in his voice for the first time. “Maybe I’ll let her keep you.”

“Nobody  _ lets  _ Jester Lavorre do anything.”

The Traveler was silent for a moment. “I’d like to help you, Bren. I really would. But I think you need to know that the first step is  _ letting _ Jester Lavorre do whatever she  _ goddamn wants. _ ” And with a stylish heel turn and a dramatic flap of his cloak, the Traveler vanished into the wind. 

Caleb sighed. “...That is what I fucking meant, you arschloch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear chapter 5 won't take as long

**Author's Note:**

> Laura said during this episode that if they did this, "the world basically ends." That's basically an invitation, right? 
> 
> Feel free to talk to me about it, I'm expellialbus on tumblr.


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